Wahoo

Wahoo are mostly known to be pelagic open ocean fish found alone or in small groups. Not the sort of fish you can easily target. Here around Isla Coiba however, they seasonally migrate inshore and gather in predictable spots. You could catch a dozen or more in under a couple hours over the same bait holding area. We don’t normally stay on a school to catch so many, we catch one or two per angler, keeping one per angler and releasing smaller fish.

We have a lot of wahoo holes all around the islands. Wahoo are found near underwater rock structure in 120 - 180 feet of water, near an island. They hang and wait up current near the bait. Wahoo are sit and wait predators. Like all white meat fish, they accelerate from a standstill rapidly to nail a bait. We most often fish for wahoo with four TLD 25s 40 lb. line, wire leader & diving plugs trolled at 4-5 knots.

Wahoo have a strong prey instinct. When one gets hooked, I speed the boat up and go into a turn, this quite often brings on more strikes. Wahoo are curious. If you troll a dead wahoo by his tail behind the boat, other wahoo will follow. Wahoo are attracted to shiny teasers. If you hang a bunch of computer disks tied off a float, wahoo will come to stare at it. If you hang a wahoo carcass off a float and cut some burly off it, wahoo will come to stare at it and then eat the wahoo pieces. We create these attractors, troll or drift them near the bait holding areas and cast metal jigs beyond the float retrieving rapidly, for hard hitting, line screaming strikes. Wahoo will very often follow a hooked wahoo. Always a good idea to cast a metal jig and fast retrieve in the area near your buddies hooked fish. Wahoooo!

Wahoo have been recorded swimming at speeds up to 46 mph. They may live up to 7 years. All tackle record is 158 lbs. The biggest recorded was 182 lb. and 8 feet long.

They don't get that big here. They get bigger further north. Down here around the equator we get fish mostly in the 20 - 50 lb. range. Now and then we see wahoo go 60 or 70 lb. We have very good wahoo fishing from Coiba between July and December.